Dictionary

dreamish en · ADJ

Etymology

From dream + -ish.

Meanings

1. Resembling a dream or the state of dreaming.
   • Instead of getting drowsier she was getting more awake—with an odd night-time, dreamish kind of wakefulness. 1951, C. S. Lewis, chapter 9, in Prince Caspian, Collins, published 1998:
   • It was fatigued thinking, dreamish thinking. She didn't even believe in spirits. But she recalled him standing firm in the waterfall current; she saw him pop up, desert dry, onto the top of Vance's trailer while it bobbed in the river; she saw her bookcase standing upright to cover the hole in her bedroom wall. 2013, Erin Healy, chapter 20, in Afloat, Nashville: Thomas Nelson, →ISBN, page 160:
   • Sometimes a faintish, dizzy feeling flits through my brain, the ground and the mountains begin to quiver. The shout of a Bedouin rouses me from a dreamish stupor, to a keener desire for water. O for a cup of the cold water at my father's door! 1861, Benjamin Bausman, Sinai and Zion; Or, A Pilgrimage through the Wilderness to the Land of Promise, Philadelphia: Lindsay & Blakiston, chapter 6, 119:
   • The dreamish, arational quality of Baraka's poems is of a piece with his contempt for the confusion of rationality with rationalization (“Bankrupt utopia sez tell me / no utopias”). 1993, Nathaniel Mackey, chapter 2, in Discrepant Engagement: Dissonance, Cross-Culturality, and Experimental Writing, Cambridge University Press, →ISBN, page 41:

Forms

Synonyms

dreamy · oneiric · dreamlike